“The Switchblade is a pretty cool piece of kit, it is a nice culmination of technologies … that have come to the fore for very small but lethal technology,” says the man in the video.
You can’t satirize the US national security business.
Back when I still had hope, twenty years ago, I once wrote about a very secretive government agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, for a daily newspaper in the heartland. The NRO operated our spy satellites and I’d discovered (I was not the first) that its head had graduated from the same school I had, Lehigh University in Bethlehem.
I’ll get back to this in a minute.
On Christmas Day the AP published a story on declassification of HEXAGON, one of the NRO’s old spy satellite programs. The piece created the impression that it was still a big secret.
However, even by the time I stumbled across it, 1991, it wasn’t, really. HEXAGON, along with the spy satellite agency, was an open secret. And while it may not have been known to average Americans it had been written about for years by a number of DC journalists and authors who delved intelligence matters.
For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.
They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.
They spoke in code.
Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.
At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret …
“The Secret” was the “Big Bird” spy satellite, its optics made by Perkin-Elmer in Danbury, also called the Hexagon KH-9.
The AP story informs HEXAGON was declassified in September. And for its piece it digs up a bunch of the old pensioners who worked at Perkin-Elmer, delivering its custom-ordered mirrors, lenses and machinery for the government’s spy birds.
However, now it’s just odd and quaint. Two decades has been a very long time.
In passing e-mail today, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy blog, remarked it “seems excessive.”
In the intervening period the country has seen radical change. The old threats are gone. And all of the people involved in the matter are either retired and nearing the end or passed on.
Even Lehigh University, the engineering and science school in Bethlehem that trained the National Reconnaissance Office chief who was the subject of my old news piece is no longer the home of “the Engineers.”
Now, it’s the school of the “Mountain Hawks,” a lame change, made because it currently enrolls more liberal arts majors than those working toward technical degrees.
The Associated Press interviews the spouses and offspring of some of the satellite workers long since departed. And it seems a bit cruel that they all had to wait until just a couple months ago to find it was OK to be told what their loved ones worked on.
“He was a Cold War warrior doing something incredibly important for our nation,” one son says of his father to the news agency.
“To know that this was more than just a company selling widgets … that he was negotiating contracts for our country’s freedom and security,” a departed engineer’s wife adds at the piece’s conclusion.
However, two decades ago it wasn’t really a secret, anymore. If you wanted to know you just had to do a little digging.
In 1991, for the Morning Call newspaper, I tried to interview Martin Faga, then the head of the National Reconnaissance Office, although not identified as such anywhere in the government record. His press officer/secretary successfully fended off the effort.
The Call was also interested in getting some background on the man from his alma mater. None of the engineering people I called at Lehigh were interested in admitting much. Even though I was nice in the newspaper they were clearly annoyed anyone would inquire about such important and allegedly still “secret” things.
Quick: Name the U.S. intelligence organization so ultra-secret the majority of Americans have never heard of it more than three decades after its creation — an organization so critical to national security that it commands a bigger budget than the CIA.
Of course you’re stumped. Top secrets are supposed to be that way.
And, odds are, you’ve never heard of Martin C. Faga, a Bethlehem native and Lehigh University graduate, who supervises the Pentagon’s clandestine National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which runs America’s most covert satellite and aerial spying programs.
Lacking any formally identified office, its letterhead classified, it is one of the last intelligence organizations that the government declines to acknowledge in any way — a status similar to that of the National Security Agency (puckishly referred to as the No Such Agency) in the mid-1970s.
Created as a joint Air Force-CIA effort to run spy satellites for the intelligence community and the military, the NRO was originally envisioned as an unclassified operation. But operating from offices on the fourth floor of the Pentagon in Arlington, Va., it quickly be came the holiest of secrets during the Kennedy administration, when Cold War tensions with its target, the Soviet Union, escalated precipitously.
[When] the Challenger blew up in the mid-1980s, derailing the civilian space program, it took with it the secret agency’s ability to lift 15-ton photo-intelligence birds at a time when close surveillance of the Soviet Union was of highest priority in the Reagan administration.
During his tenure as head of the NRO, Faga has had to grapple with the task of restoring the NRO’s capability to orbit heavy spy payloads independent of the Space Shuttle.
Because of political decisions made when the NRO was led by Hans Michael Mark, under secretary of the Air Force under Jimmy Carter, the clandestine organization had hitched its wagon firmly to NASA. Left without a means to reliably orbit key equipment, the NRO moved to restore its autonomy under Edward Aldridge (NRO chief during the Reagan years) and, later, Faga, by redesigning the retired giant Titan ICBM as its primary workhorse and expanding launch facilities at Vandenberg, Calif., and Cape Canaveral, Fla., so spy satellites could be efficiently launched from either coast.
That effort has been continually plagued with problems. Titans failed catastrophically in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, destroying themselves and two Keyhole satellites, a HEXAGON in 1985 and a more-advanced model, known as a KENNAN, the following year.
[In 1991], the number of journalists and authors aware of NRO operations in anything more than a general sense can be counted on the fingers of one hand: William Burrows, a New York University journalism professor and author of “Deep Black”; Vince Kiernan, a military space reporter for Space News; Weiner, and Jeffrey Richelson, an investigator who has published a number of carefully researched books on the U.S. intelligence community.
Richelson, Weiner, Kiernan and FAS scientist [John Pike, now director of GlobalSecurity.Org, a national security affairs public information site for which I am a Senior Fellow] all named Faga as head of the NRO during interviews in preparation for this story.
During attempts to interview Faga for this article, his public information officer, Air Force Capt. Marty Hauser, requested a list of questions that might be asked of the assistant secretary.
After the questions were reviewed by Faga’s office, Hauser said that Faga would not be able to address two general queries concerning surveillance of Iraq’s clandestine nuclear efforts and the classification of current and future “technical collection” programs.
However, Hauser said that Faga would be willing to speak about the path that led to his career in intelligence. Later calls to his office elicited no response.
At Lehigh University, the assistant secretary studied electrical engineering and physics. Enrolled in the Air Force’s ROTC program and active in Bethlehem’s Trinity Episcopal Church, he is remembered by professors at the university as reserved, an extremely organized student who “knew his stuff,” according to LU Dean John Karakash.
After graduating from Lehigh in 1964 with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, following a bachelor of science degree in 1963, Faga entered the Air Force as a second lieutenant. He was assigned to the Air Force’s Systems Command, a huge organization which oversees the research and development of military space technologies.
While there, Faga worked on laser and infrared applications in reconnaissance.
(The NRO also operates from within Systems Command as the Office of Space Systems at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Calif.)
From 1968-’69, Faga was employed as a technical representative for Perkin-Elmer Corp., a manufacturer of scientific instrumentation.
Perkin-Elmer’s optical division, a highly classified installation in Danbury, Conn., developed the HEXAGON spy satellite’s 6-foot reflector-equipped Cassegrain-focus telescope in the early ’70s. Hughes, a defense contractor, now owns and runs the division.
Marty Faga, even in retirement, the quiet man. If he has something interesting to say no one will ever know it.
So much time has passed, the secrets — if they are told — are just curious old tales of now-antiquated technical triumphs and past glories in a country that no longer exists.
Stories and theories on demand, at your fingertips.
At the end of Drones over paupers: An Empire Merry Xmas, a syndication piece at GlobalSecurity.Org, I made the joke: How difficult is it to find someone to assert the Beast [the US stealth drone] was taken over by alleged Iranian cybergenius and tricked into landing [there], for a website, desperate for eyeballs, that used to be a newspaper that went out of business in the real world for lack of readers?
Threats to the United States from a shockwave of electricity known as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, are not “far-fetched??? …
Americans should be relieved to know that the bipartisan Congressional EMP Caucus, which I head with Representatives Yvette Clarke (a Democrat from New York) and Trent Franks (a Republican from Arizona), is working with colleagues to protect our grid from EMP.
The House unanimously approved the Grid Reliability and Infrastructure Defense Act in 2010 to give the federal government needed authority to protect the grid against EMP. Legislation to protect the grid against EMP is also advancing in the Senate.
Bartlett, as is always the case with the cult, calls the issue bipartisan. It is bipartisan in that the GOP-led electromagnetic pulse doom caucus has always been successful in getting one or two insignificant Dem congresspeople to be pets (or sock puppets).
It’s a role custom-fit for Congressmen with either no ability or no inclination to author any meaningful legislation. For example, if you try to find anything significant by Bartlett, or birther Trent Franks of Arizona, it’s a tedious search.
Bartlett on first: Preparing for life after electromagnetic pulse doom is fun, he implies.
Does Roscoe Bartlett look like someone anyone with a shred of sense would pay attention to? Rhetorical, obviously.
Two days ago, Secrecy blog published a report by the JASONs, a group of eminent scientists regularly tasked with providing analysis and conclusion on potential threats for the US government.
The U.S. electric power grid is vulnerable to damage from severe electromagnetic solar storms and remedial measures should be taken to reduce that vulnerability, a new study (large pdf) from the JASON scientific advisory panel concluded.
On the other hand, the JASONs said, catastrophic worst-case scenarios advanced by some are not plausible, and they should not serve as a basis for policy making.
The JASON study put a stake through the heart of some nuisances in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, although some readers might not have guessed it.
In 2010, the electromagnetic pulse doom lobby was able to get the Department of Energy to issue a report authored by one of the small businesses that comprise it.
Common sense would seem to dictate that leaders of corporations ought not to be empowered by the US government to provide threat assessments which stand to directly enrich their interests.
But that’s how the US conducts business. From top to bottom, people read of agencies subverted by the businesses they are supposed to regulate.
And sometimes people then come to the conclusion that the US government is only a tool for the accelerated transfer of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of such mentioned businesses.
Which is a pity.
The latest example, a smaller one than the national Minerals Management Service, comes to you courtesty of the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (or NERC).
Reads the New York Times, courtesy of Matthew Wald:
A report just issued by the Energy Department and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as Nerc, an industry group that polices the power grid, lists three categories of threats to the grid: coordinated cyber- and physical attacks, pandemic disease and electromagnetic damage.
What Wald does not mention, or perhaps has failed to notice, is the “report??? has essentially been written by the small interests which make up the Cult of EMP Crazy, with government workers as their staff.
Three of the report’s authors are part of the bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby. (Follow the link.)
These include John Kappenman — billed as being part of something called Storm Analysis for the report, William Radasky of Metatech and Michael Frankel of Roscoe Bartlett’s old EMP Commission.
The JASON study dealt with the threat scenario posited by the electromagnetic pulse lobby, specifically one posited and fashioned by John Kappenman and Metatech, a small business that provides analysis on a variety of alleged electromagnetically pulsing menaces (allegedly used by criminals wielding electromagnetic pulse suitcases of doom — follow the links in the old DD post to see these).
While the JASON report does not deal in the slightest with the notional threats posed by alleged criminal misuse of electromagnetic pulses, it does dispassionately discuss the real hazards associated with the impact of severe space weather on the Earth’s magnetosphere.
In does this in an erudite manner, unadorned by conflicts of interest.
“We agree that the U.S. electric grid remains vulnerable,??? the JASONs concluded. “Mitigation should be undertaken as soon as possible to reduce the vulnerability of the U.S. grid. The cost appears modest compared to just the economic impact of a single storm,??? they added.
But the panel declined to endorse a worst-case scenario proposed in 2010 by J. Kappenman (large pdf), who envisioned “the possibility of catastrophic damage to the U.S. electric grid, leaving millions without power for months to years.???
“We are not convinced that the worst case scenario… is plausible. Nor is the analysis it is based on, using proprietary algorithms, suitable for deciding national policy,??? the JASON report said.
It appears the work of the JASON group became necessary when the electromagnetic pulse lobby was able to successfully get its apocalyptic report on solar weather passed through the Department of Energy in 2010.
Seemingly vetted by government agency, it was used to generate two stories in the New York Times, one in 2010 and one earlier this year, pieces suggesting the US government wasn’t paying attention to threats to the infrastructure described by its own people.
Except, in this case, it wasn’t done by independent scientists on the government payroll. The study was furnished by a business in the electromagnetic pulse lobby.
More on the issue, as it happened earlier this year, was discussed here on DD blog.
Briefly, it would seem the powers that be in the Department of Energy realized they’d done something that would be used to haunt them in distributing the Metatech report, a report that was merely part of a workshop the department had sponsored on electromagnetic pulse effects in 2009.
“And so it made a tactical error when it originally allowed the EMP lobby to author a report, one then given weight by publication on its website,” reads the original post here at DD blog..
“Now it legitimately wishes to correct the matter … Brushing the kooks off once again is eminently doable.”
And here, as 2011 draws to a close, the JASONs, a group of independent scientists commissioned by the US government through the MITRE Corporation, have politely but authoritatively done just that.
“The Cult of EMP Crazy must be so disappointed,” commented one government man to DD blog.
The experts say the damage would be millions of times worse than 9/11. Nobody would have power, and most modern cars wouldn’t start. The Internet has been completely destroyed, and the financial system is offline, perhaps forever. All phone communication is dead, and virtually all commerce across the entire country is brought to a complete stop. Our country (which doesn’t know how to live without technology) would be completely stripped of it in an instant …
What would you do if all the supermarkets in your area shut down because food could not be transported? What if you were suddenly unable to call your family and friends for help? What if you were suddenly unable to get the medicine that you need?
This certainly isn’t going to enhance anyone’s Christmas cheer one iota, but perhaps when we hang our stockings and say our prayers on Christmas Eve, we’ll humbly ask Jesus (the author of and reason for this joyful season) for the very special Christmas present of deliverance from the evil entities who are, even now, plotting our demise. Oh, yeah … and even if the fat elf doesn’t descend through the atmosphere to stuff our stockings, perhaps our merciful Creator will save us from far worse stuff coming down upon us from the sky … like electromagnetic pulse destruction.
Despite reports that Iran hijacked a United States stealth military drone early this month and forced it to land in hostile territory, not everyone is buying the hype.
“Some kind of mechanical malfunction” is probably what caused the unmanned drone, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel (nicknamed the “Beast of Kandahar” by Afghans who’d seen it), to go down 140 miles inside Iran on Dec. 4, according to John Pike, director of the Alexandria, Va.-based think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity, echoed his colleague’s assertion.
“Stuff goes wrong,” Smith told SecurityNewsDaily. “It’s certainly an embarrassment to the United States, as advertised. The bragging on the part of the Iranian government is unsurprising.”
It’s all about us-US-US!
Competing for this year’s long list of produced news stories and factoids of unintentional bleak hilarity: Overstretched U.S. drone pilots face stress risk.
Flying drone aircraft over Afghanistan from the comfort of a military base in the United States is much more stressful than it might seem, even for pilots spared the sacrifice of overseas deployment and separation from family and friends.
America’s insatiable demand for drone technology is taking a heavy toll on Air Force crews, according to a six-month Air Force study, with just under a third of active duty pilots of drones like the Predator reporting symptoms of burnout and 17 percent showing signs of “clinical distress.”
That’s when stress starts undermining their performance at work and their family lives …
[The] biggest factor wearing down drone crews were things like long hours and inadequate staffing.
Inadequate staffing. One associates stress due to inadequate staffing to jobs where corporations have mercilessly downsized the labor force to increase short term profit.
In other words, drone crews suffer stress of the same nature as that of cubicle workers in corporate America. Letting Hellfire missiles off the hook on small groups of people, always poorer and smaller, on the other side of the world, is a smaller component of the job.
This is described as “bothersome.”
Really. Not joking, here. It’s what the man said.
“We try to select people who are well-adjusted … We select family people … People of good moral standing, background, integrity,” [Air Force] Lieutenant Colonel Kent McDonald, a man who worked on the study, told Reuters.
“And when they have to kill someone, and when they’re involved with missions when they’re observing people over long periods of time, and then they either kill them or see them killed, it does cause them to re-think aspects of their life and it can be bothersome.”
Stressful in Somalia
“The U.S. has used drones to hunt down al-Qaida-linked militants in Somalia and Yemen, among other countries,” reported the AP last week. “Their humming is a constant feature in the sky in many of the major towns in southern Somalia, especially the capital city and the militant-controlled southern port of Kismayo.”
Notable quote after recent news story after Iowa locals get all atwitter about Northrop Grumman shipping a shrink-wrapped naval aviation drone on a flatbed. (They thought it might be a UFO, seriously.)
“It’s difficult to fly an unmanned drone through commercial airspace,” a company man told the local news agency.
Easier to fly them in airspace over countries where we don’t give a s—
about the natives, except as targets, and whatever they do or don’t have flying around.
Stephen King donates money for heating oil assistance to poor
“Horror author Stephen King’s efforts to raise money to help low-income Maine residents pay their heating oil bills this winter have exceeded goals,” reported a Boston newspaper.
This was after it was widely reported the US government would reduce home heating oil assistance by over 50 percent this year, from $55.6 million down to $23 million.
Cost of stealth drone, the Beast of Kandahar, lost over Iran, based on estimation from price of prototype: over $24 million.
Because of Newt Gingrich’s momentary popularity — I noticed he’s the cover of Newsweek which must surely mean the bubble’s about to burst — many more people have been familiarized with the mythology of electromagnetic pulse doom.
Right now, it’s not just for the far right GOP missile defense/bomb Iran lobby anymore.
And although Gingrich has tried to make it seem an entirely pseudo-intellectual thing, there’s no escaping its attachment to extreme Christian religiosity and the belief that catastrophic end times are upon the country, trials which will only be survivable through Godliness and the quick adoption of the skills of the deep woodsman and farmer.
A political blog, Maryland Juice, points out Roscoe Bartlett, the ancient Republican Congressman who has been warning of electromagnetic pulse attack for as long as I can remember, is running for re-election.
Bartlett has never been successful in getting any electromagnetic pulse defense legislation passed. He has forever been a minor Congressional nuisance, one who always gets re-elected despite serving his Maryland constituents poorly.
However, at Maryland Juice, Bartlett’s participation in a wacky survivalist documentary called Urban Danger is noted.
There are a number of teasers for Urban Danger, peddled on DVD, posted to YouTube.
Here is the best, if that’s the word to use:
Bartlett is on first.
The script: The US will collapse soon, through an unspecified series of disasters which include (but are not limited to) total electrical grid failure, rampant bioterrorist-spread disease, and the death of money. Only those in the country, on farms with their own fruit trees, vegetable crops, chainsaws for cutting firewood, elevated water supply, and Bible-reading skills will survive. You will have to defend yourself from the hordes fleeing the cities, just like in AMC’s The Walking Dead.
You must view all three Urban Danger teasers to get the full bit. (I jumped on the grenades so you don’t have to.) But watching the one posted, if you can endure it, delivers the general idea. There ain’t no progressives in this bunch. Or children and other young people, it would appear.
This old white Christian paranoid End Times mania is inseparable from the electromagnetic pulse attack story. And the political professional EMP lobby has always nourished it.
These days it’s virtually mainstream due to adoption by significant segments of the country’s dysfunctional and increasingly irrational political class.
Newt Gingrich’s rise in the polls has brought attention to his various “big ideas,” and plenty of derision from other GOP Presidential hopefuls and the media. Among the most undeserved targets is the former Speaker’s concern about an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack …
The usual media suspects have recently run skeptical stories on his “doomsday vision” and “silly science” … A single nuclear weapon detonated above the U.S. might not kill anyone immediately. But in the worst case millions could subsequently die from a lack of modern medical care or possibly food, since farmers couldn’t harvest crops nor distributors get food to market. Access to drinking water could be cut if many of America’s dams, reservoirs and water-treatment facilities were shut down …
Mr. Gingrich deserves credit for bringing EMP to public attention.
Here’s a real dose of cheer, emblematic of the legion of crazy far right white f—s delivering public service announcements for what to watch out for when the electrical grid goes down.
Ripples from the Newt Gingrich electromagnetic pulse attack phenom, published in the New York Times days ago, continue lapping over the minds of those mesmerized into believing one of our most long-standing techno-rubbish myths.
In this case, it’s our electromagnetic pulse bomb — the weapon that’s been coming but never quite arriving for twenty years.
While the Times is correct in dismissing any Iranian or North Korean threat—neither country has missiles capable of reaching the U.S., Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and both have never demonstrated a desire to commit national suicide—what Broad does not mention is that the effects of EMP are hardly “poorly understood???: the U.S. has an “E-bomb??? in its arsenal.
More than that, the Pentagon considered using it during the 2003 invasion of Iraq …
The principle is simple enough: a tube filled with explosives, wrapped with copper wire, encased in a metal shell. The copper wire is used to create a powerful magnetic field and when the explosives are fired, they compress the magnetic field to produce a powerful burst of electromagnetic energy called the “Compton effect.???
A large enough device can generate up to two billion watts, about what Hoover Dam turns out in a day.
The weapon is attached to a cruise missile. Any piloted craft would run the risk of frying its own electronics, because EMP waves can bounce off objects, like the ground, and be reflected back at the attack craft.
One of the features of our electromagnetic pulse bomb story — and it’s been a solid one for virtually two decades — is that spectacular claims are routinely made, wonderful things requiring no substantial evidence for verification.
This also is one of the rules William Irving Langmuir developed to described really bad science [in 1953, built upon a description of US physicist Robert Wood’s debunking] of French scientist Rene Blondlot’s “N-Rays” back in 1903 — but that’s another long story.
Briefly, it’s the “science of things that aren’t so” and that neatly describes the provenance of America’s electromagnetic pulse bomb mythos, too.
I’m going to cheat, as usual, and allow something published at Globalsecurity during the summer (by me) to do the heavy lifting. A the time, there was a Post story indicating American worry about a Chinese electromagnetic pulse weapon, brought on by standard pathologies that define the US newsmedia and its interaction with the US war machine.
Because there has been so much nonsense printed in the US media about our electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays (for close to two decades), the Chinese — maybe — thought they should look into it, too. This, in turn, sparked a minor US intelligence evaluation to determine whether or not generals should be worried about such a thing.
For the Washington Post blog article [in mid-summer], the electromagnetic pulse bomb or ray was rebranded as a high power microwave weapon. This is a semantic trick US arms developers came up with a number of years ago to escape the ridicule attached to older electromagnetic weapons projects.
The Post’s blog spawned this explanation, capped by one ludicrous sentence:
“The United States and other governments have long worked to perfect high-power microwave technology.
“The problem, experts say, is that it’s been difficult to make the weapons both safe and effective. An HPM device would have a range of only a few hundred yards; weaponry that was designed to have a greater range could effectively set the atmosphere on fire.”
Set the atmosphere on fire. A good copy editor might have immediately spiked that for the sin of being an unprovoked assault on common sense.
However, the EMP/HPM crowd has played fast and loose with facts for close on twenty years. And they have been very good at getting the ludicrous into the news. The result has been that journalists and passers-by, people who do not know better, fall prey to the classic American trait of belief in utter bull—- because said bull—- is published in so many places …
For the Post, Jason Ukman ran down John Pike at Globalsecurity.Org, an agency for which I’ve been known to take on the role of “expert” on cybersecurity and cyberwar. And electromagnetic pulse bombs and rays used to regularly be part of that beat. giving me ample opportunity over the years to heap scorn upon them.
For the Post, Pike delivered this: “People have been talking about these things for many decades and they just haven’t gone anywhere” …
“All the same, given U.S. research efforts, Pike said it wasn’t surprising that the Chinese were pursuing the technology,” reported the Post.
“One would be amazed if they were not doing this sort of thing,” Pike told the newspaper.
And this is a classic case of mirroring — a foreign power believes it should be in the business of trying to make electromagnetic pulse weapons because it’s military men have read about our efforts to make the same things for years. That no one actually ever makes them, or anything that actually works, is beside the point.
The problem with these types of weapons can be explained. But it’s never mentioned in news stories. Never.
Two years ago I put it this way …
The fundamental problem associated with non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons is simple to describe.
And it’s never addressed, except through elliptical statements about limits of their “portability” and the ability to predictably “couple” the weapon’s electromagnetic effect to a target. The problem is this: dispersion cripples such notional weapons, or as a scientist might say, any effect is constrained by the law of inverse squares. Nature’s laws, fortunately for us, aren’t subject to whimsical change.
“The intensity of the influence at any given radius r is the source strength divided by the area of the sphere,” explains a page at a university physics department. “Being strictly geometric in its origin, the inverse square law applies to diverse phenomena. Point sources of gravitational force, electric field, light, sound or radiation obey the inverse square law. It is a subject of continuing debate with a source such as a skunk on top of a flag pole; will it’s smell drop off according to the inverse square law?”
A bit of scientific humor, the latter bit about the skunk.
But there is never any humor associated with stories of electromagnetic pulse bombs [and rays]. It is always deadly serious stuff.
If you’ve followed the story for a long time, another facet of it is made abundantly clear. Through the years, various kooks associated with electromagnetic weaponry have come and gone. Some have retired. One, a much decorated old military man, even died before he found the grail.
But the ranks of electromagnetic pulse nuts is never really thinned. There are always more of them arriving or in development.
The National Ground Intelligence Center assessment on China’s interest in the empire’s electromagnetic pulse weapon crap is here.
On page four of the eight page scan, it reads:
“It is widely acknowledged that (conventional) explosively powered [radio frequency] sources with military application are a difficult technological hurdle (despite some overly hyped Internet articles on e-bombs to the contrary), and it is very unlikely that China could have overcome these hurdles.”
Over the years, I’ve been responsible for damaging many of these articles. What the assessment does not mention is that defense contractors in the pay of the US military were those who were very guilty of the hype thing.
Notoriously, just before the United States charged into Iraq a decade ago an editor from one of the big news agencies called to ask how journalists could protect their laptops and phones from the electromagnetic pulse weapons we were allegedly about to use on Saddam Hussein.
The man wanted to know if they could store their stuff in a microwave oven, the reasoning being that if a microwave kept radiation in during cooking, it might keep it out, too.
No joke, sadly. Electromagnetic pulse weapons over Iraq in 2003. Now you know why we won that so easily.
Like the related techno-mythology of electromagnetic pulse attack on the United, the mythology of our (or someone else’s) magical electromagnetic pulse bomb refuses to die.
It’s regularly published here, there and everywhere, completely free of any reasonable standard of proof. And you can distinguish it by the many features described here. The most amusing, or painful — depending on your mood, are the fantasies fit for the entertainment of small children.
In summer with the Washington Post it was “set the atmosphere on fire.”
For today’s piece in Counterpunch: “A large enough device can generate up to two billion watts, about what Hoover Dam turns out in a day.”
Getting this techno-crazy-weapon excrement into print in the United States is easy. Publishing something sensible on the subject, not so much.
